A View of the Stars
by Songcrystal
Summary: When he woke up, she said she would be there. He woke up alone. What happened the night after Aliens in a Spaceship. HodginsAngela angst.


Disclaimer: The characters from Bones are not mine—I just like to play with them.

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It was dark, and he couldn't breathe.

It was dark, he couldn't breathe, and he knew that in a few moments, although he didn't precisely know what was going on, he knew he was going to die. He didn't know where Dr. Brennan was, probably she had already gone. The sand was infiltrating his lungs, and he couldn't force his arms to make the effort to swim for the surface. Couldn't even feel his arms. His thoughts turned away from his impending death, turned to the woman who wouldn't let him into her life. He tried to focus on her smiling face in his mind, gasped for air.

And then, as suddenly as a snap of the fingers, there was wind. He sucked in the oxygen, and blinked his eyes open. It was still dark, but not the blackness of being trapped beneath the ground. This was the darkness of a room at night.

Angela's room.

And the events of the last day came rushing back to him. He and Dr. Brennan had been trapped by the Gravedigger, then rescued by Booth, Cam, Zach, and Angela. His peeps. His family. He had ditched the hospital as soon as he was awake enough to steal some crutches and hobble out, and had practically raced to the lab, trying to outrun the demon of knowing that the person who had nearly buried him alive was still out there somewhere, just waiting for a second chance.

He had pressed himself to his microscope the way a child would to a favorite teddy bear. And then _she_ had come in, and she did have a teddy bear. She had told him to sleep, and he had told her it was impossible, that he didn't want to wake up alone. He'd expected her to vacillate, to once again wall herself off from him. Maybe it was pity for the tears slipping down his cheeks, and maybe it was weariness, but she had told him to come home with him. But where was she now?

He felt the wind against his face again and squinted into the shadows. The door to the bedroom was open, and the only place Jack knew that had easy access to open air was the small terrace adjacent to the living room. Already wearing a tee shirt and boxers, he pulled on his socks and padded out to the comfy, bohemian lounge Angela had made for herself, feeling the chill increase.

There she was, sitting on a little lawn chair with her sketchbook on her lap. A small flashlight in her left hand provided illumination over the charcoal pencil that was frantically sweeping along the page in her right. Her hair was down and hung like a dark cloud over her shoulders. He could barely make out her profile. He stepped forward and heard the floor creak under his feet.

Her head shot up and she turned around to face the noise. Their eyes locked, and she breathed a sigh of relief. "You scared me," she said as he came up behind her to gently touch her shoulder. "I'm not used to having anyone here."

"Are you all right?" He tried to lean over and look at what she was drawing, but she had already closed the pad.

"I'm fine. I just couldn't sleep. Did you have a nightmare? I'm sorry I wasn't there to wake you." She was babbling. He knew she only babbled when she was overly excited or nervous. He wasn't betting on excited—although a man could hope.

"It's fine. I was just worried when I didn't know where you were. If you want me to leave so you can sleep…"

"No, no! It's all right, really. Sometimes I get like this." When he started massaging her shoulder with his hand, she looked up at him with open awareness in her eyes. He loved how he could see every emotion mirrored there sometimes, as much as he admired her ability to close that expressive face down, shutter it like a window braced for a hurricane. What he saw now was lust. She wanted him, but was afraid to let herself touch. Afraid to trust, now more than ever, he thought. After all, she'd already had to study the bones of one boyfriend. It was too soon to lose another that way.

"May I see what you were drawing?" he asked softly.

Instead of answering, she flipped the pad back to the page it had been on. It was an image of the night sky, only this sky was alive with lights, with the swirl of galaxies and the streak of comets. "There was supposed to be a meteor shower tonight, but you can only see a few sparks from this latitude. Do you see them?"

She pointed, and he followed her index finger to a point on the horizon. Her apartment was situated so that it looked directly out over the Potomac. He should have known she would never choose an apartment where she would be boxed in. She read his thoughts, as she so often did, and said, "I like to have a view of the stars."

Where she was pointing, above the city buildings, he could see small specks blinking like fireflies. The lining of one cloud was illuminated in filmy silver. Wordlessly, she handed him the telescope sitting beside her.

With his eye up to the lens, he could make out the specks more clearly. They winked in and out like…well, like meteoroids with accompanying ionization trails. Or like little blue dots against the night sky. But when he put the telescope down and looked at Angela's picture, he was struck by the difference. What he saw as blue dots, she saw as living presences, rustling through the air like a herd of galloping horses. When Angela drew meteors, they breathed—they lived.

"You've made them beautiful," he said, stunned anew by her.

"They are beautiful," she returned. "I'm just reproducing what they make me feel." And when she looked up at him, he knew they weren't just talking about meteors. She turned a few pages back, and he saw the picture she had drawn of him as a pirate. "I thought you were going to die that night," she murmured, referring to the night he had sat down to drink a few beers with a murderer, then gone diving with him manning the air-hose. "I didn't even hardly know you, and I was still terrified."

"I'm sorry," he told her. "I do things like that. It never occurred to me before that anyone else might worry." He didn't add that before her, there hadn't been anyone to be worried.

They were silent for a moment. Then she said, "I've never been so scared in my life. You and Bren…I don't know what I'd have done if…" And all of a sudden she was crying, sobs wrenching from her as if being torn out of her soul. Instinctively, he held out his arms and found them filled with female.

"Shh," he whispered, stroking her back and hair. He shushed her and told her everything was fine, that everything would be all right. And though he hadn't believed it before, at the hospital, at the lab, even when she had told him before they had gone to sleep, he found he could believe it now. He could believe if it would make her believe.

"I'm getting you wet," she sniffled some time later.

"And I got you wet earlier. We'll call it even."

She stepped back from him, and they stared at each other for a moment. He wanted to kiss her, to take her to bed and erase the horrible events of the past few hours from both of their minds, but he knew that if he did, she would regret it later. Especially if he told her he loved her, as he wanted to. They were both vulnerable, and if he kissed her, he would tell her. There would be nothing he could do to stop it, and she wasn't ready for that yet.

He watched as the mask slipped over her features once more. She became composed as she wiped her cheeks and eyes, then picked up pad, telescope, and flashlight, all of which had toppled to the floor, forgotten. "We should probably go to sleep. Brennan will want us at the lab tomorrow."

"Angela."

She looked up at him, and for once he could see cracks in her façade. A trace of sorrow in those luminous eyes, guilt and anger that she couldn't yet face her demons and be with him. She shook her head, fighting all of it. Now it was his turn to feel pity, and with it a surge of love inside his heart that he had to close his eyes against.

When he opened them again, she was walking inside. He followed her back to the bedroom and watched as she deposited the contents of her arms in a scatter on her nightstand. She slipped under the covers and closed her eyes. When he slid in next to her and wrapped his arms around her, she didn't protest, only sighed as if the battle were just too much for her this night.

He decided to test his luck and pressed a kiss against her hair. No response. He sat up a bit and looked at her. There were smudges under her eyes from the tears, and a track along her cheek that looked like the tail of a meteor. Her eyelashes fluttered as she exhaled lightly, sound asleep. A view of the stars, she had said.

He didn't have the gift of reproducing what he felt through art. He could only whisper that he loved her and hope that one day it would be enough. But seeing the stars through her eyes, in her eyes, he didn't fear the dark anymore. He knew that hers was the only view he would ever need.

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_Author's Note: Hope you enjoyed! Please review if you have the time._


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